Monthly Archives: July 2021

The pandemic has affected our sex lives in many unusual ways, but perhaps none more unusual than this development: The coronavirus has highlighted the possible public-health benefits of glory holes. Sexual positions that make use of walls as physical barriers have long been considered niche. But when the New York City Department of Health recommended them last month as part of a push for safer sex, it tapped into a question that many of us have been asking: How do you seek sexual satisfaction during a global health crisis?

I havent had sex in more than a year, mostly because I took COVID-19 very seriously. I disconnected from the public sphere. No one visited my apartment. I disinfected my groceries and covered my apartments air vents with trash bags. As a queer person, I could barely register the idea of sex while living alongside a deadly virus that nobody really understood. One study published early in the pandemic showed that 43.5 percent of people reported a decrease in the quality of their sex life. Among study participants, they had fewer sexual encounters with other people, and even masturbated less often.

But queer and trans people have a rich history of pursuing pleasure, especially during dark times when that very pursuit is dangerous, even illegal. This drive stems from the fact that many queer and trans peopleespecially those of colorlive under a kind of sociocultural duress in which our livelihoods and human rights are constantly subject to negotiation and popular debate, to say nothing of our physical safety. In spite of this reality, queer and trans people have innovated not by waiting for the future to get better, but by prioritizing the urgency of feeling pleasure right here, right now. So I knew that some of us would create novel pathways around the pandemics roadblocks to sex. I also knew that as the world reopened and Grindr profiles got fired up again, queer innovators would bring the kinks learned during quarantine into their post-vaccine encounters with other people.

Read: The Pride flag has a representation problem

In a time when touch has been so limited, some people have been moving toward a future full of bold new pleasures. Alex Jenny, a therapist based in Chicago, told me she joined a nude-sharing group chat, started an OnlyFans page, and began having sex online. In Virginia, where I live, one friend sauntered over to a lovers doorstep one night wearing a mask and nitrile gloves, picked up a Speedo sealed in a ziplock bag, went home to do a photoshoot in the swimwear, and sent his beau the photos and videos. Many people are reimagining their own boundaries, thinking of this period of virtual intimacies, of distance and little physical contact, not as a lack but instead as a sort of edge play through sexual self-discovery.

For Julian Kevon Glover, an assistant professor of gender, sexuality, and womens studies at Virginia Commonwealth University whos writing a book about the nuances of nonmonogamy, that meant attending an online sex party with her primary partner. [My partner and I] played on camera with a group of like-minded folk and it was much hotter than I ever expected, she told me. Ive learned that queer people are and will always remain quite as horny, and we are inventive.

Though the pandemic necessitated screen-based intimacy for some, queer people have always used the internet as a place to navigate their sexuality. During the late 1990s and into the early aughts, I spent more time than I care to admit navigating chat rooms on gay.com and Manhunt, where I pointed and clicked my way to some of my first sexual experiences. But I wasnt looking only for sex. Growing up as a Black teenager in Ferguson, Missouri, during the era of frosted blond tips, white-seashell necklaces, and Abercrombie & Fitch, I was hoping to connect with anyone who could help me not feel so alone. The researcher David F. Shaw talked about this form of online intimacy, or computer-mediated communication, as the uncharted territories of cyberspace where men sit alone at their keyboards producing and inscribing themselves within interactive texts of homosexual desire and need. Historically, gay online forums have been so widespread that a 1994 Wired top-10 list noted that of the most popular chat rooms created on AOL, three were for gay men, one was for lesbians, and one was for swingers.

Read: The coronavirus is testing queer culture

Part of the reason queer sex thrives online is because of the internets covert nature. Prior to the webs easy anonymity, queer people had to seek sly ways to court sex in front of other people without being detected. The hanky code of the 70s and 80s, an elaborate system of discreet communication wherein people put different colored hankerchiefs in their right or left pockets to indicate sexual interests, allowed queer people to speak about kink in plain sight without words. Craigslist, which most people know as a place to find an apartment or a piece of furniture, was for many queer people a vibrant place to find sex before the Fight Online Sex Trafficking and Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Acts of 2018. The list of ways to hook up goes on: sultry personal ads in the back pages of gay publications such as XY and Ttu, dating sites such as Grindr, and now, the Zoom sex parties of the coronavirus era.

These arenas have facilitated cultural practices that the anthropologist Shaka McGlotten calls virtual intimacies, or feelings of connection mediated by communication technology. I was amazed by how swiftly queer nightlife and sex worlds moved to Zoom, but Aurora Higgs, a queer Ph.D. student, artist, and performer from Richmond, Virginia, says that the required shift to online events ended up feeling more liberating than in-person shows. In Virginia, liquor laws limit activity in mixed-beverage establishments, including how much skin dancers can show, which clothing items can be removed, and how dancers can remove them. But the brilliant thing about online burlesque, Higgs told me, was that there was no bar. We were able to do stuff we werent able to do before, things like nudity, she said. It was interesting to see how people were utilizing their own spaces at home to dip us further into the fantasy.

Higgs told me that she plans to start a website where she can do cam work and online kink photography. As a Black trans woman, I sometimes feel like everyone has access to my sexuality but me. Im expected to be passively content at the end of a violent gaze, with little opportunity to turn my gaze on to others or on myself, she said. With camming and virtual shows, the gaze that normally violates me is temporarily being used at my discretion.

Even though sex can now take place in real life again for some, many queer and trans peoplewho have long dealt with the reality of HIV/AIDSmust navigate transparency about sexual health with the added complication of COVID-19. Trust is the currency that will shape how queer and trans people approach hooking up in a post-vaccine summer, Ayo Dawkins, an artist from Virginia, told me. Not that I trusted everyone I was with pre-pandemic, they said. But I knew sex wouldnt kill you. You have condoms to protect you from STDs and STIs, and you have Truvada (PrEP) to protect you from HIV, but nothing could protect you from COVID aerosols. Today, with new questions to ask about sexual-health statuses, some queer people may favor a more curated approach to sex that relies heavily on closed sexual networks.

In many ways, the past year and a half of sexual distancing, online intimacy, and exploration of pleasures has been a rehearsal for a yet-to-be-imagined queer sexual ecosystem. One of my favorite passages from the book Cruising Utopia, by the theorist Jos Muoz, reads: Queerness is not yet here. Queerness is an ideality. Put another way, we are not yet queer Queerness is a structuring and educated mode of desiring that allows us to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present, which is to say that queerness might be the longing for a better world to come. I always say that creativity and innovation stem from the margins, from those who are resisting the kind of flattened human experience that comes from being denied access. If COVID-19 has taught us anything, its how to foreground the importance of feeling as a means of survival.

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The Surprising Innovations of Pandemic-Era Sex - The Atlantic

President Star Parker of the Center for Urban Renewal Education has accused President Biden of not promoting an abolitionist education network after the radical group was linked to the new semester coronavirus handbook. Parker told the American Newsroom Thursday that educators under the administration are trying to turn our country into a Marxist utopia.

Star Parker: Well, the crumbs are all over your face. Your hands are still in the jar, but you havent eaten the cookies. Of course, they would deny that they are trying to transform our country into a Marxist utopia. I think its time for conservatives to admit that the collectivist government that controls the funded national education system is no longer functioning.

The CRT Group, promoted by BIDEN ADMIN, is associated with the best education officials

As we are divided in half, its time for money to chase children to the school their parents want. In other words, our society is unleashed, and civil society is unleashed because of the collapse of our common culture. We are no longer one unit. We are worldly and sacred. The sacred believe in personal responsibility. The world believes in groupism. So this is not the place where we pretend we can push all our children into one environment and teach them all kinds of values that are consistent with each other.

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Bidens Ministry of Education will deny trying to turn the United States into a Marxist utopia: Star Parker

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Biden's Ministry of Education will deny "trying to turn the United States into a Marxist utopia": Star Parker - Texasnewstoday.com

Princess Zelda finally got to star in her own game in The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword

The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword HD (Switch)By: Nintendo

MUCH like reusing last year's half-charred birthday candles, Nintendo is celebrating Zelda's 35th year with the same game they used to mark the adventure series' 25th anniversary back in 2011.

The last of the old-school Zeldas, 2011's Skyward Sword released in the Wii's twilight, making much of the console's waggling long after the motion control novelty had worn off. Yet despite wilting in the shadow of its successor, the mighty Breath of the Wild, Skyward Sword has plenty to love especially in this bells and whistles do-over for the Switch.

After a quarter century focusing on an elfin boy named Link, Skyward Sword's water-coloured fairytale was the first game to focus on the series' titular Princess Zelda. Set in the floating utopia of Skyloft, when our abduction-prone princess is kidnapped, young Link travels to the terra firma land of Hyrule, haunted sword in hand, to rescue her.

The game still looks good in this portable conversion, running in HD at a flawless 60fps

A treasure trove of side quests, Skyward Sword's environment gradually revealed new secrets as you acquired the toys to explore it. Its motion controls put literal new twists on an old fairy tale. Many enemies became puzzles in themselves, requiring specific directional strikes to vanquish, while your weapon could be powered up by holding the controller aloft, a la He-Man.

Using the doodles of Paul Cezanne as inspiration, its impressionist visuals disguised the Wii's limitations a canny artistic choice that means the game still looks good in this portable 'Loft conversion, running in HD at a flawless 60fps.

Other quality of life improvements include a fully controllable camera oddly absent in the original which makes exploration much more enjoyable. With auto-saves, there's no more trudging to back up your progress, while the whole shebang runs at a faster clip thanks to skippable cut-scenes and your talking sword, Fi, doing a lot less talking.

Of course, the biggest change is to the controls. Given the original was custom-made for the Wii's bespoke Motionplus controller, playing on-the-go now relegates all its motion nonsense to traditional button presses. It's a clumsy compromise, and purists after the Wii experience will find it much more intuitive to play on the telly, where the console's Joy Cons even manage to outdo the original in the accuracy stakes.

Unfortunately, Nintendo have locked Skyward Sword HD's most useful tweak behind a plastic paywall. By tapping Zelda Amiibos to the Switch, players can zip between the game's overworld and surface at will a time-saving feature not available in the original.

It's peak Nintendo to charge 50 for an updated 10-year-old game then hide its biggest improvement behind a 25 toy.

Dodgy business practices aside, Skyward Sword's charms have lost none of their lustre. After the game-changing open-world bounty of Breath of The Wild, there's a whiff of the relic to Nintendo's latest but as a nostalgic stop-gap until its sequel lands, you could do a lot worse than the Wii's final hurrah.

The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword

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Games: The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword HD still offers plenty to love in new HD do-over for the Switch - The Irish News

To be sure, Partition itself was the product of a utopic plan enacting Enlightenment notions about the rational ordering of society. It promised to produce order out of a religiously and linguistically mixed society. It promised a homeland to those out-of-place in nationalist India.

Many who moved did so out of faith in this project, out of conviction, at times against the wishes of their families (most famously, Jinnahs only daughter did not move). Indeed, the deliberate sacrifice of home and bonds was the price that made the result participation in the creation of a new nation-state all the more sacred. (See oral histories in Anam Zakaria, Footprints of Partition. On Pakistan as a utopian ideal, see also Gyanendra Pandey, Remembering Partition.)

The poet credited with launching the Pakistan movement, Muhammad Iqbal, was shaped by education in Germany and Britain. Among his closest friends in Lahore from 1932 was Muhammad Asad, the Austro-Hungarian Jew who opposed Zionism but supported the creation of a Muslim state in South Asia. He had been an advisor to Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud in the 1920s one of that world of European spies in Arabia I described in my first book.

Like them, he collapsed the tasks of reinventing the Middle East and himself. He would go on to shape Pakistans constitution and head the Middle East Division of its Ministry of Foreign Affairs. My point in invoking Asad is to highlight the cosmopolitan intellectual context in which the idea of Pakistan took shape, however much it was also about the local mission of saving Muslims from domination by non-Muslims.

Enlightenment and romantic notions are dialectically related in this intellectual history. I am merely skimming the surface here, focusing on the chain of influences and sociological bonds to offer a sense of the global production and payoff of these ideas over time, up to our present, as we shall see.

In promising a national homeland for South Asias Muslims, Iqbals Pakistan also tried to move beyond nationalism. It was utopic in that ambition, too. Like Tagore, Iqbal denounced the European modernity exposed on the Western Front, the way competitive nationalism produced militarism, imperialism, and indifference to religion. His call for Pakistan was intended as a critique of nationalism and an important first step towards a post-nationalistic postwar world.

Muslim political autonomy would foster in one place a less divided and exploitative society on the basis of an Islamic moral system that would serve Muslims and non-Muslims alike. His notions of the unity of Islam were authentically his but also shaped by romantic orientalist notions he absorbed in Europe. (Barbara Metcalf, Husain Ahmad Madani: The Jihad for Islam and Indias Freedom.)

Indeed, although we take Partition as synonymous with the mass migration it entailed, mass migration was not part of the plan, even as late as the early 1940s. The idea was rather to create autonomous Muslim-majority areas in which Hindus and Sikhs would remain, while Muslims would remain in areas in which they were minorities.

Then came the idea of splitting Muslim-majority provinces. The idea of mass eviction and migration only came in March 1947 when riots in Rawalpindi enforced the notion that minorities did not belong in the lands that had now been designated Muslim or non-Muslim (Pandey). In the 1930s, Iqbal was thinking outside the box of nationalism, whatever the ironic appropriation of his goal for nationalistic purposes.

The India that was to result from the creation of Pakistan was also imagined through the lens of modern rationality. Even Indians who regret Partition speak approvingly of a purer nation formed through the sacrifice of dismemberment.

The journalist Alpana Kishore argues that without Partition, India would have gone on wrestling with an unresolved demand for a Muslim nation-state. It would have been haunted by the spectre of partition and the very different vision of national development embraced by Pakistans founders. (Zakaria).

This recalls BR Ambedkars views on Pakistan. He too was an anti-colonial thinker who was simultaneously critical of the nation-state. Yet, he saw Partition as unavoidable once the demand had been raised (and given his own notions of Muslim difference). To refuse it would simply endanger the new republic with the constant threat of civil war. (Ambedkar, Thoughts on Pakistan, 1941; Pakistan, or Partition of India, 1944; Aishwary Kumar, Radical Equality: Ambedkar, Gandhi, and the Risk of Democracy.) Arguably, in the end, Partition has haunted India anyway.

But besides these rationalist-idealist visions of a postcolonial Pakistan and India, other utopic visions were also available, for a time. Some saw an equally post-nationalist utopic prospect in the challenge of unifying a subcontinent that, they acknowledged, was divided. The poet Mohammad Ali Jauhar emerged as a leader of the Khilafat movement.

As president of the Congress party in 1923, he said:

I had long been convinced that here in this country of hundreds of millions of human beings, intensely attached to religion, and yet infinitely split up into communities, sects and denominations, providence had created for us the mission of solving a unique problem and working out a new synthesis, which was nothing low than a federation of faiths For more than twenty years I have dreamed the dream of a federation, grander, nobler and infinitely more spiritual than the United States of America, and today when many a political Cassandra prophesies a return to the bad old days of Hindu-Muslim dissensions I still dream that old dream of United Faiths of India.

Like Mohani and Bismil, he became disillusioned with Congress and Gandhis leadership in the early 1920s. He attended the First Round Table Conference in London in 1930-31 (Gandhi attended the one later in 1931, visiting the Thompsons while there). He died in England and was buried in Jerusalem, at his own request. Would he have remained in India or moved to Pakistan in 1947? Or later? Or would his survival have made his utopic dream a more viable possibility?

Others perceived a different utopia: the idea of an India that possessed an inherent unity even in its diversity, that was a single nation, which Partition violated. Maulana Husain Ahmad Madani, leader of the Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind, the senior party of Indian ulema, saw imperialism as the disrupter of religiously plural societies that had their own integrity. Iqbal argued that it severed ethnically distinct Muslims who might otherwise have been united around their shared religion. (Aamir Mufti, Enlightenment in the Colony; Metcalf.)

Much Indian historical writing is in this vein and has found it difficult to escape the obligation to demonstrate that oneness. This is partly because, apart from the Ambedkar approach, it was difficult for Indians to read Partition as anything but loss. Pakistanis, however nostalgic, could at least pin hope on the strength of having created something new.

To some Pakistanis, India is a dreamlike homeland, an origin story more than a land from which they are exiled. (Zakaria). Still, many survivors of Partition on both sides recall untroubled pre-Partition times marked by inter-communal harmony.

At times for elites from cosmopolitan settings, nostalgia for the Raj is part of this mix. At times joint resistance to it. At times the Unionist Partys popularity under Sir Sikander Hyat Khan, a close associate of Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, in the 1930s is recalled as proof of the existence of a culturally and politically unified Punjab betrayed by higher politicians (at other times its social conservatism and loyalty to the Raj recalled as liabilities), even though the pressure of maintaining that unity against the competing forces of the League, Congress and the British was probably what killed Sikander Hyat Khan in December 1946.

We have no way of gauging the accuracy of memories untroubled pre-Partition harmony, but as Anam Zakaria and other collectors of oral histories note, memory and how people choose to remember certain events is as important as historical facts themselves. (Zakaria). Indeed, some memories were shaped by dismay at the violent change Partition wrought. Even those who did not move witnessed the destruction of their communities and the arrival of new, tormented faces, a transformation that made some see the struggle as a waste.

At the same time that the Pakistani state whitewashes Sikh history in Punjab literally in the case of the frescoes at the entrance of the Dera Sahab complex in Lahore we hear of Pakistanis who miss Diwali and Eastern Punjabis who miss Eid. (Nadhra Khan, Lahore Revisited: The City and Its Nineteenth Century Guidebook, lecture.)

It is true that many communities have coexisted in India and that Partition included many acts of inter-communal kindness. But equally true is the fact that in the end, Congress agreed to Partition, and that, since 1947, the community has again and again been constituted through violence in India impossible facts for those committed to the notion of an eternally unified India betrayed only by Jinnah and the Muslim League. (As Pandey notes, violence did not accompany Partition; it was constitutive of it. See also Mufti, Enlightenment in the Colony.)

But apart from nostalgia for a lost utopia, even after Partition, many imagined the possibility for a unique international friendship between the two nations, in which the border was in fact a bridge permitting connection and communication.

Deferrals or reversals of the decision to stay or move, indicated by late departure or ongoing maintenance of bi-national existence for business and family reasons, are perhaps most symptomatic of this outlook. They represent a willful and wishful belief in the prerogative to remain locally and privately rather than nationally embedded as long as it was practicable.

It was certainly not obvious that Partition would mean total severance of connection. And in fact, many crossed legally without much obstruction until the 1965 war. Border communities continued to engage in common celebrations of Baisakhi. Others crossed illegally between bordering villages, like Germans in the early years of the Cold War.

Zakarias collection of oral histories includes the poignant case of Muhammad Boota who repeatedly crossed from his adopted village in Pakistan into his old village in Indian Punjab to search for a Sikh girl he had loved. As in the great qissas (romantic epics like Waris Shahs), he never found her but remained devoted to her. (Zakaria; See also the story of Ghulam Ali in Zamindar, Long Partition.)

The border became more clearly demarcated and impassable after the wars of 1965 and 1971, but even then, through 1986 no line or wire demarcated the border near Kasur villages, and people crossed accidentally. (Zakaria.)

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, there was the utopic belief that borders did not change anything, even when they became impassable, that an un-severable regional unity transcends the experience and fact of Partition.

Here it is crucial to remember that the Indian and Pakistani dream for nation-statehood was fulfilled in a moment in which the entire system of nation-states was in severe crisis, with displaced minorities emerging in West Asia and Europe. (Mufti notes that nationalism has historically been a great disrupter of social and cultural relations, setting forth an entire dynamic of inclusion and exclusion within the very social formation that it claims as uniquely its own and with which it declares itself identical. By rendering some part of that formation as minority, it renders that group potentially movable. Thus, it has historically been a force for violent displacement. Enlightenment in the Colony.) This context shaped calls to rise above both nationalism and borders.

Maulana Azad (who tried his hand at poetry too in his younger days) insisted even after Partition on the existence of a composite culture, shared among all and possessing secular and cosmopolitan dimensions. He was a nationalist, in the sense of believing in the reality of an Indian nation that could stand independently of British rule, but also grasped the dangers nationalism produced for minorities.

His solution was to refuse politics based on fear to refuse to fear for the fate of a Muslim minority in independent India and to refuse the very notion of a Muslim minority. This leap of faith marks the secularism of Azads public life, explains Aamir Mufti. He articulated this complex vision in a speech in October 1947 in Jama Masjid in Delhi, which persuaded many Muslims there to stay, just when nationalism was violently reorganising the region into new nation-states.

Those who articulated such visions at once perceived their vulnerability, their increasingly outdated utopian nature. They knew that refusing nationalisms disruption of pluralism was its own kind of madness, reminiscent of Bishan Singhs stubborn attachment to the no mans land of Saadat Hasan Mantos Toba Tek Singh.

But while Mantos story encapsulated that madness in a dark, Chekhovian manner, such madness found a different kind of sanction in the Urdu poetic tradition, where it seemed less the breakdown of reason than the typically hopeless (but no longer melancholic or politically passive) idealism of the poetic subject, the lover.

They were the farzaane (learned, wise men) who double as deewane (mad, inspired men) in Jagannath Azads ghazal titled, 15 August 1947: Na puchho jab bahar aayi to deewanon pe kya guzari/ Zara dekho ki is mausam mein farzaanon pe kya guzari (Dont ask what befell the mad (the lovers) when spring came/ Just look at what befell the wise in this season).

With the plural deewane, the sher [verse] embraces the world of Azads fellow poets, his friends, as the losers of this history. And indeed the friendship among poets was one critical way in which the border was rendered meaningless, at least for some, especially those who chose to see it as a temporary inconvenience on the way to a future goal that they knew would transcend all borders.

While Faiz continued his political and poetic pursuits in Pakistan, his friend Makhdoom Mohiuddin of Hyderabad pursued poetry, lyric-writing for the film industry, labour activism, Communist Party of India leadership, trades union activism and activities with the Progressive Writers Association and Indian Peoples Theatre Association and was a primary leader of the Telangana Rebellion from 1946-50, the rebellion of peasants against Telangana landlords and the Nizam of Hyderabad.

He also inaugurated the short-lived Paritala Republic. Jailed in 1951 like Faiz in Pakistan he wrote the poem, Qaid (Imprisonment). On his release, he fought elections and joined Parliament, participating in the national political process as a member of the Communist Party of India.

For these poet-activists, Partition was a tragic yet transient event in a long struggle for far more radical ends. It was inconclusive. And their agreement on that across the border, their continued solidarity, was a mutual affirmation.

When Makhdoom died in 1969, Faiz composed a poetic homage adapting his friends celebrated ghazal, Aap ki yaad aati rahi raat bhar. [Your memory came to me all the night long.] Both versions can be read on multiple levels, as all ghazals, but let me offer a suggestive reading of the maqta (last verse) in each.

Makhdooms ended, Koi deewaana galiyon mein phirta raha/ Koi awaaz aati rahi raat bhar. [Some madman (lover) wandered in the streets/ Some sound came all the night long], evoking the eternal beckoning of some ideal in the darkness, towards which the poet-as-agent-of-history fumbles, perhaps never reaching it.

It is at once near yet out of reach. Faizs version ended, Ek umeed se dil behelta raha/ Ek tamanna sataati rahi raat bhar. [The heart amused itself with a hope/ A wish tormented (me) all the night long], evoking the desire for communion with a friend who is now impossibly far, in classic Sufi fashion, but also perhaps a memory of their shared, incomplete pursuit: the soothingly idealistic hope for a more humane future that is simultaneously agitating, despite our knowledge that it is ideal and thus unachievable.

For those entangled in this border-transgressing literary and political community, Partition was not a stopping ground. It could not be allowed to become a stopping ground. As Faiz wrote, reflecting on 1947 in 1951, Chale chalo ki woh manzil abhi nahi aayi. [Let us keep going, for that destination has not yet come].

To be sure, the notion of a long, joint journey ahead, despite borders, was also a mechanism for coping with the actual trauma of Partition, which Faiz genuinely felt. He considered it too big to cope with in poetry apart from his attempt in that 1951 poem, Subah-e-Azadi (Freedoms Dawn) although in allusive ways he did in other works too, I believe. (Rakhshanda Jalil, Liking Progress. Faiz did not think he wrote about Partition beyond this 1951 poem.)

One might reasonably interpret this indifference to borders as a form of denial, as fantasy. Arguably works like Toba Tek Singh engaged in precisely such fantasy, as literary form, whatever Mantos commitments to social realism.

Fantasy is a departure from consensus reality, in the words of one literary scholar (Kathryn Hume, Fantasy and Mimesis: Responses to Reality in Western Literature, quoted in Karline McLain, The Fantastic as Frontier: Realism, the Fantastic, and Transgression in Mid-Twentieth Century Urdu Fiction, Annual of Urdu Studies 16), and belief in the immateriality of the border was a departure from the consensus reality of Pakistani and Indian nation-statehood. More than fantasy, however, it was romance, as articulated clearly in Faiz and Makhdooms couplets above. The unattainable end utopia itself was a reworking of birha in its own way, as was the experience of Partition itself.

Poets aloofness from Partition helps explain why post-Partition Urdu poetry continued to invoke extra-national geography: the Leftist Pakistani poet Ibn-e-Insha (born in Jalandhar in 1927), composed Tu Kahan Chali Gayi Thi (Where Had You Gone) in the 1950s, gesturing with equal ease towards Karachi and Delhi.

Nazir Qaisers poetry is as ecumenical in its geography. Shiv Kumar Batalvi (often referred to as Punjabs Byron) drew on the ancient epic about Puran Bhagat of Sialkot for his epic verse play, Loona in 1965. Jagannath Azad came to India, but his poetry dwelled on memories of his homeland, his lost chaman (garden).

While in Pakistan on his first post-Partition visit in 1948, he wrote the celebrated couplet, Main apne ghar mein aaya hoon magar andaaz to dekho/ Ke apne aap ko manind-e-mehman leke aaya hoon [I have come into my own home, but look in what manner/ For I have brought myself like a guest].

It remained his home. Alienated as he was, he was still not a guest but guest-like. He was split into both host and guest, at once at home and not at home, desi and pardesi.

Pakistani poets also continued to reach for the non-Islamic but (idols) and puja (worship, implying idol worship) on which the ironic idiom of Urdu poetry depends, despite the vanishing, ghostlike presence of such things in their midst.

Indeed, in a sense, the entire Indo-Islamic poetic tradition presumes a world of Muslims coexisting with non-Muslims to dramatise the ironies of worldly and unworldly faith at its core. (Sikh identity markers similarly presume a mixed social context. Else why the need for distinguishing markers?) This literary transcendence of Partition mirrored socio-cultural continuities such as the celebrations of Indian festivals among Pakistanis near the border. (Riyaz Wani, interview with Anam Zakaria.)

As Zakaria notes, even those who left out of conviction felt a bond with the home they abandoned because of ongoing relationships and memories: There is no clear line for these people. It is difficult to decipher what they love more, where they belong more. This confusion is the only truth for them. (Zakaria.)

If the goal was a coherent national self, the result was a population of divided selves. The exile, the refugee, the orphaned, the converted, the abducted-and-reclaimed all these survivors were in different ways split in many cases violently split, even shredded selves.

Permit me a metaphor from physics: In quantum theory, the uncertain, non-deterministic, smeared nature of electrons helps explain the stability of atoms; similarly, the stability of South Asian identity depends on a kind of indeterminacy.

Punjabis in particular seem smeared through space. Nations are like the impossibly rigid atomic structures of classical mechanics. They cannot contain such uncertainty: Makhdoom and Faiz were both literally in captivity in independent India and Pakistan in 1951.

Gyanendra Pandey calls on historians to explore the meaning of Partition in terms of what it produced the social arrangements, forms of consciousness, subjectivities it created rather than focusing obsessively on causes, a focus betraying Indian historians commitments to particular utopic visions of India. (Pandey, Remembering Partition.)

Curiously, as Rakhshanda Jalil notes, Urdu poets focus more on the consequences of Partition than its causes. (Jalil.) To me, their preoccupation with effects reveals their sense of the epiphenomenal and possibly transient nature of Partition their preoccupation with other utopias, unfinished business that Partition traumatically disrupted. Pandey might find in poetry if not historical writing the earliest analysis of what Partition did to subjectivity and consciousness quite apart from the human destruction it unleashed.

Here again, we find intriguing intersections with shifting subjectivities in Europe. Enlightenment notions of a coherent, rational self had long since smothered notions of an internally split self among Europeans.

Early versions of Adam Smiths Theory of Moral Sentiments had described a divided or doubled self which became more metaphorical and less literal in later versions, once the notion of an individuated, internally coherent modern self took hold in the late 18th century. (See Dror Wahrman, The Making of the Modern Self: Identity and Culture in Eighteenth-Century England.)

The turn of the twentieth century saw new testing of this concept, most conspicuously in metropolitan occultist circles who experimented with the relationship of self to other, albeit now locating the split internally, in the psychology and neurobiology of the individual, rather than in the operation of social claims on the individual.

Theosophists were part of this cultural world, most notably Annie Besant, whose journey from turn-of-the-century British socialism (she famously led the matchgirl strike in London in 1888) to a prominent leader in the Indian nationalist movement was inseparable from her explorations of spirituality and selfhood. (Judith Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London.)

She too was mixed up in the world of poet-activists, joining the poet Sarojini Naidu in representing in London the case for Indian women to vote. (Naidu was a Bengali from Hyderabad who joined the national movement after the 1905 partition of Bengal and became the second woman to preside over Congress after Besant. She was governor of the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh in 1947-49 when Urdu poets there deliberated staying or going.)

Now, the subject of Urdu poetry had long been understood as split. This was what Sufi longing for the union was about. Momins much-loved couplet is exemplary: Tum mere paas hote ho goya/ jab koi doosra nahin hota [You are with me thus/ as when no second person is there].

In true mystic union, the self becomes extinct. This idiom seems ready-made to address the post-Partition condition of a partial, parted, or divided self. Urdu as a poetic language figured critically in the articulation of this subjectivity. As Mufti shows in his beautiful analysis of Faizs poetry, Indianness has come to encompass the disavowal of Indianness (like the electron that both is and is not).

Mufti cites, paradigmatically, Faizs Marsia (Elegy) from a 1971 collection: Dur ja kar qarib ho jitney/ ham se kab qarib the itne/ Ab na aoge tum na jaoge/ vasl o hijran baham hue kitne. [The extent to which you are close now that you have gone far/ when were you ever so close to me/ Now you will neither come nor go/ how as one union and separation have become].

In this four-line poem, Mufti perceives a dialectic of self and other in which the subject and object of desire do not so much become one but simultaneously come near and become distant and are rendered uncertain. It recalls Zakarias story of a man in a Pakistani village who daily sees his old village across the border it is at once near and far. (Zakaria. A similar phenomenon transpires on the German border towns Edith Sheffer describes in Burned Bridge.)

This is the reality of modern Punjabi subjectivity: contradictory, tense, antagonistic. Faizs grasp of this dialectically produced self clearly resonated; his work has remained phenomenally popular across the region. As Mufti explains, he articulated an Indian experience of the self that took division seriously and yet transcended borders and communal and national divides, much as he tried to do in his own literary and political commitments.

After all, he worked within an idiom in which indefinite separation from the beloved was the only ground from which to contemplate union. He subversively renders the abandoned home as the beloved, rather than a heathen land virtuously abandoned inverting the religious interpretation of Partition as hijrat (in the sense of the Holy Prophets flight from Mecca to Medina).

Urdu could uniquely convey the reality of this split self, nurtured in Pakistan where it was cut off from its homelands in Delhi, the Deccan and Uttar Pradesh, where Urdus status simultaneously declined.

Poets worldly experience of exile and refuge gave hijr (separation, departure) a range of new, secular connotations, notes Mufti. (Mufti). Faizs agonistic embrace of that inheritance is a South Asian expression of modernity, at once reminding us of the worldly basis of religious experience itself what early Punjabi romances expressed as allegory, or, in the language of the Punjabi tappa (folk lyric): Milna taan rab nu hai, tera pyaar bahaana hai [It is with god that I seek to unite, your love is merely the pretext]. For long, poets have grasped the instrumental nature of the worldly experience for the sake of higher spiritual experience.

The persistence of that mystical idiom, and the love successive generations profess for it, reveals the continued intimacy of the secular, modern self with its religious inheritance. In this too, modern South Asian subjectivity senses its incompleteness, its exilic existence. (On this see also Mufti. This is not a uniquely South Asian quality, of course. See for instance, Thomas Laqueur, The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains.)

In short, we cannot think of post-Partition identity only in the terms of the normalised vocabulary of the new nation-states, presuming autonomous national selves based on the European template. Progressive Writers attached to such requirements of normality were the kind who, Mufti speculates, suddenly turned against Manto, whose work and affect fell beyond that pale. (Mufti. Manto was disowned by the Pakistani Marxist-leaning literary set. Charged with obscenity, he avoided his sentence of prison with hard labour on appeal.)

The possibility of transcending national identity within oneself is powerful. For EP Thompson (in Scotts luminous interpretation, again), poetrys role was to leaven politics with imagination, to suggest a middle ground betweendisenchantment with perfectionist illusions and complete apostasy. That ground is the demanding, yet a creative place of continuing aspiration. (Joan Scott, Gender and the Politics of History.)

The work of continuing aspiration is the work of Azads deewane. The split South Asian self is the middle ground poets gave us between disenchantment and apostasy. It is Becketts, I cant go on, Ill go on and Gramscis mantra-like, pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.

The New Left that Thompson helped form in England after the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 attracted the Communist, atheist and anti-imperialist Pakistani Tariq Ali, the grandson of Sikandar Hayat Khan and an important interlocutor of Edward Said, another deep thinker about exile and anti-colonialism who met Faiz in Beirut.

Alis anti-imperialist critiques were as globally sweeping as Faizs poetry about Chile, Palestine, Namibia and the Rosenbergs. Talal Asad, son of Muhammad Asad, has emerged as a major thinker about religion and secularism. The chain of inheritance and restless, continuing aspiration is long.

Thompson came to India for the first time in 1976, after our poets alternative visions had long expired. He was warmly welcomed by Indira Gandhi and her government in acknowledgement of the friendship between their fathers. But it was the time of Indiras Emergency.

He was horrified by the governments repression of dissent and by the Communist Party of Indias support of it and noted the strange convergence of Western modernising theory with orthodox Moscow-directed socialist theory: Both imagined a modern urban intellectual elite with know-how imposing modernity and progress upon the nation.

Both prioritised top-down, capital-intensive technologically-driven developments depending on a disciplined workforce for national economic take-off. Through a vulgar (ie un-poetic) economic determinism, Marxism echoed utilitarian and positivist ideas. (Scott Hamilton, The Crisis of Theory: EP Thompson, the New Left, and Postwar British Politics; Hamiltons 2007 talk at the History Department of the University of Auckland.) Politics without poetry is lifeless, and poetry without politics tends to the self-indulgent.

It is the same in Pakistan: I was fortunate enough to meet Jazib Qureshi in 2016 (2021 note: he has sadly just passed away), through the genius of the Bay Areas Urdu Academy, and he commented on the absence of poets of real standing in todays Pakistan, no one to fill the shoes of Josh or Iqbal.

If modern Urdu poetry evolved as critique of empire and nation it is no surprise that as the Left has crumbled so has poetrys most powerfully transcendent function. Modis India is bent on suffocating the Left further.

Indias poets are returning their national awards in the face of the governments thuggish attacks on dissent of all kinds, rediscovering their role in history and outside exclusionist mainstream nationalism. (See David Barstow and Suhasini Raj, Indian Writers Spurn Awards as Violence Flares, New York Times.) As we continue to look to technology to save us, despite the unending disasters that pile up before our eyes, it is time perhaps to revisit and reinvent the possibility and promise of poetic action.

Poetry is a social and collective endeavour. The writer alone cannot make poetry or poetic action. In Urdu poetry, the reader identifies entirely with the first-person voice of the poet. The poets place in history becomes the readers too.

This possibility for such total identification, for a kind of subsumption in the poet, is astonishingly universal. I identify with the Hum (collective and first-person subject) of Faizs poetry, even though (on the face of it) I am a woman, a Hindu and an Indian Punjabi (where he was a man, a Muslim and a Pakistani Punjabi).

Urdu poetry is queer in this sense: a space of non-normative identity and politics. And yet, it could not attend to the plight of Heer. When Jagannath Azad was leaving Pakistan after a visit to return to India, Muhammad Tufail, editor of the Pakistani Progressive literary journal Nuqush, took sweets to him at the station, quipping, Tumhein to yun rukhsat karte hain jaise beti ko rukhsat kiya jaata hai [You were send away in the way one sends off a daughter]. (I thank Hamida Chopra for sharing this story.)

Instead of separation from a beloved of unspecified gender, he rendered Azads exile from his homeland in the more clearly gendered form of the daughter leaving her parents home to join her new family after marriage a rite common to Hindu, Sikh and Muslim weddings in the region.

Playing on the land-as-mother trope, the departure becomes forward-looking, a rite of passage to adulthood progress itself. It is more final than the beloveds separation, but also less rigid, in that a girl can and does go back to her old home at times, albeit to be indulged as a guest with few substantive entitlements. But Tufails line also reminds us that, however vaguely gendered the poetic terms in which Faiz and others wrote about it, Partitions violence was deeply gendered.

Amrita Pritams plea to Waris Shah and Mantos stories, like Khol Do (Open It) acknowledged that reality. So too has scholarly work on Partition by Urvashi Butalia, Ritu Menon, Kamla Bhasin, Veena Das and others. They diagnose the complicity of the two new states in appropriating the violence that was done to women within an ideology of community and nation.

Shiv Kumar Batalvi (born in 1936) may have been activated by such themes in his recuperation of womens agency and sexuality in Loona, his celebrated retelling of the ancient epic of Puran Bhagat in 1965. Stylistically, he was influenced by the qissas as well as European epic poetry. The legend goes that the Sialkot prince Puran Bhagat spurned the advances of his young stepmother, Loona, a sinfully lustful seductress, who wreaked violent revenge: his arms and legs were amputated and he wound up exiled from his home, becoming an ascetic who later forgave and blessed his punishers.

But Batalvi tells the story from Loonas point of view: the disgust of this lower-caste young girl from Chamba at being married to an old king against her wishes, her entirely reasonable desire to be with a man her own age, Purans rejection of her out of suspicion of the merely sexual rather than spiritual nature of her attraction, and her self-sacrificial revenge.

For, her destruction of Puran is her own too. She knows she will live in infamy for it, but hopes that her infamy might prevent society from producing forcing future Loonas to marry against their will. Having borne the blame for Purans death for centuries, Loona finally finds peace in Batalvis play. Known for his passionate expression of the agony of separated lovers, here Batalvi redeems worldly love and the rebellion of youth. (For more on Loona, see Sa Soza, Shiv Kumar Batalvi.)

Here the punishing violence of Partition is visited on a male body, with Purans dismemberment and exile. In blaming society rather than Loona for this tragic outcome, Batalvi at once exonerates the individual perpetrator of violence (whatever her gender) while validating all Punjabi womens need and desire for such revenge.

He renders the Punjabi subject of history as female. Notably, he published this earthily Punjabi work on the eve of the repartitioning of Indian Punjab on linguistic lines, when other Punjabi Hindus claimed Hindi rather than Punjabi as their mother tongue, a choice made possible by the longstanding elision of Hindi with Urdu.

Loona was the Patakha Guddi (Firecracker Kite) of her time (a song penned by the poet Irshad Kamil, a Muslim from Malerkotla in Indian Punjab and sung by Jyoti and Sultana Nooran (Punjabi Muslims from Jalandhar). (Composed by AR Rahman for Imitiaz Alis film Highway.) She is the poet of her own destiny. She lives her contradiction as a means of superseding loss, a way of living as if in exile even when at home, as Maulana Azad felt he did, given his particular background and education and relationship to Muslim and nationalist politics in his time. (On Azad, see Mufti. Certainly, it is also a luxury of class.)

Modern Urdu writing, having displaced the relationship of language and self to place as Mufti tells us, is a vehicle for exilic thinking, an awareness, wherever one happens to be, that modern history has been one of marginalisation and uprooting on a massive scale, that split selfhoods are typical, in South Asia, but also in Germany, the Balkans, Cyprus, Palestine/Israel, Ireland and elsewhere. (Mufti.)

What is the poets role in history? Of course, the question is romantic.

Byron was romantic, Thompson was romantic, Faiz was romantic, Punjabis are romantic, land is romantic. And romanticism has its dangers: the British were romantic, Nehru was romantic, Silicon Valley is a romance. Dams and drones are romantic.

The Hindu Right and the Islamic Right offer romances of their own. There is a marketplace of romance, but the romance of the Left has too long been out of stock. Bollywood cannot do it alone, and it too, after all, is bound up in the worship of profit, god and nation.

Part one of this essay: Priya Satia: Why poetry remains a primary resource in remembering and understanding the Partition.

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How the Partition contributed to the queerness of Urdu poetry to make it non-normative - Scroll.in